- Nor gently sloping side of breezy hill,
- Nor streets, at distance due, imbower’d in trees;
- Will half the health, or half the pleasure yield,
- Unless some pitying naiad deign to lave, [580]
-
With an unceasing stream, thy thirsty bounds.
- ON festal days; or when their work is done;
- Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance,
- To the wild banshaw’s melancholy sound.1
- Responsive to the sound, head feet and frame [585]
- Move aukwardly harmonious; hand in hand
- Now lock’d, the gay troop circularly wheels,
- And frisks and capers with intemperate joy.
- Halts the vast circle, all clap hands and sing;
- While those distinguish’d for their heels and air, [590]
- Bound in the center, and fantastic twine.
- Meanwhile some stripling, from the choral ring,
- Trips forth; and, not ungallantly, bestows
- On her who nimblest hath the greensward2 beat,
- And whose flush’d beauties have inthrall’d his soul, [595]
- A silver token of his fond applause.
VER. 584. banshaw] This is a sort of rude guitar, invented by the Negroes. It produces a wild pleasing melancholy sound.
-
The banshaw is another name for the banjo, an instrument that originated in Africa and arrived with the enslaved in the Americas. There, it evolved, as did the music played on it, to become an integral part of Afro-Caribbean and African American musical cultures. European colonists in the early Caribbean were fascinated both by the banjo and the music and dancing of the enslaved. For example, Hans Sloane (1660-1753), a physician and naturalist who visited Jamaica in the seventeenth century, got someone to transcribe some of the songs that he heard. He included these transcriptions in A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707, 1725). For more on music and dance, see “Movement” on this site. ↩︎
-
Grass-covered ground, turf. ↩︎